God Is on Line One

For years fundamentalist Christians avoided Hollywood like the plague. But times have changed—times have become biblically ripe—and the Lord has called them to a new mission: to go unto Babylon and make movies

The Antichrist is ready for his close-up. He’s been waiting for centuries. Here he is, smiling wide in the desert of Israel as the tanks roll in—the armies of the world come to worship at his feet. If only they’d read the Script—the one that was written so long ago—they’d know: He has deceived them all. Deceived them by guile and pure Antichrist charisma. Deceived them into thinking he is the Savior when he is really—oh, it must be said all the things that he is: Lucifer, Beelzebub, Ahriman, Shaitan, the most dreaded and feared Abomination. But, alas, God so loves the world that He shows up in the nick of time. His power is awesome, like something from Twister: It rends the sky, filling the earth with the first light of the Apocalypse. Fighting back, the Antichrist rips open his flesh, revealing the Beast within, which is vile and gnashing and surprisingly wet, like a fish hoicked from hell itself. “It is I!” he roars to humanity. “It is I, your Lord, who commands you!” But it isn’t—not anymore. Just then the earth rattles, convulsing as we knew it would, and the desert of Israel collapses like a doomed soufflé. Satan and his ignorant armies are going down.

That’s when I see the first glimmer of hell. It’s flickering on the monitor before me, a hot spume of agony and backdraft. I’m in a postproduction studio in Hollywood, watching the final scene of a forthcoming movie. Satan, having failed to win the Apocalypse, is somewhere in all that lava.

The movie is called Megiddo: Omega Code 2, and it’s a new kind of entertainment: the Evangelical Christian thriller. When you hear the words Christian movie, do not think sweeping Cecil B. DeMille epics about the making of stone tablets. Think bleak action flicks about secular ruination and the coming Apocalypse. Think the Grimmest Story Ever Told. A slew of these movies are already out or in the works—films produced by conservative Christians hoping to regale, convert or otherwise mortify moviegoers. Films like _Left Behind, _based on the wildly popular series of apocalyptic novels, and the first Omega Code, which was the surprise small hit of 1999. These movies take their story lines from the Bible, but they motor past the simple little plagues of the Old Testament (locusts? They laugh at locusts) to get at the real nasty stuff in the Book of Revelation.

On this day, the battle scenes for Megiddo have already been shot at a “secret location” in California. But hell is in limbo. A group of computer imagists is still tweaking the effects, still sorting out the design flow of Hades—how many eternal flames, how many pools of lava. Visions of winged demons float on their screens.

The visual-effects producer, a Christian named Rich Cook, brings me up to speed, explaining what happens at the end of the film—and the end of the world. There’s a Final Battle in which all these people are killed, he explains, and then the Beast is cast down. “He’s sucker punched by God’s light,” he says. “And he bounces down this shaft in the earth, and then he lands in this lava pool. He lands in the top one, flows into the bottom one and then jumps out right in front of the camera, screaming as his flesh is burned off.”

What an exciting end to life as we know it!

Yes, Evangelicals seem to have discovered the one great biblical tale they’re willing to pay to see: the end of secular life and the tormented suffering of those who lived it.

Couldn’t these Christians make movies about the inspirational life of Jesus or the nifty acts of the apostles? No, and the reason is as clear as Scripture: It’s too late. Many of these Evangelicals believe we are already living in the End Times. If they’re going to make a movie about Christ, it will be about the next time He comes—in a blaze of glory and ballistic-missile fire.

Indeed, the new Christian film is remarkable not only for its apocalyptic fixation but for its embrace of Hollywood explosives, special effects and biblical violence. Megiddo producer Matt Crouch, a devout Christian, has taken a lot of flak for it, but he’s still plugging ahead. One of his crewmen hands me a press release headlined MEGIDDO—OMEGA CODE II WRAPS PRODUCTION WITH A BANG! It brags about the “amazing array of tanks, artillery, gunfire and explosives” used to shoot the Final Battle scene, including “over six hundred giant gasoline bomb explosions.” People on the set, it reads, “thought we were shooting a Schwarzenegger film.”

The press release ends with this bright little teaser: “Megiddo is scheduled for a [fall] 2001 release…if the world survives that long.”

You must go deep into the Dream Center to find Matt Crouch. Out in Echo Park, past the baby blue Scientology building and the calles filled with storefront churches—what can now be called the faith barrio of L.A.—the endless parade of signs telling you that you are headed in the righteous direction: COME BACK TO CHURCH. THERE IS NO SALVATION EXCEPT THROUGH HIM.

Up a hill, to a strange, campuslike complex called the Los Angeles Dream Center. The main building used to be a hospital. Now it’s rented out by filmmakers and religious groups—a dream center if ever there was one. The communion of these two worlds—young Christians alighting from church buses, film crews unloading gear from their trucks—gives the place an off-kilter vibe. It’s as if Bob Jones University had gone Hollywood.

Gener8Xion Entertainment operates out of an office beneath the Dream Center’s vast parking lot. It’s a typical Hollywood-trailer setup, with gimcrack walls and a transient feel. Sure enough, Gener8Xion will soon be out of here—moving on up to the old Hanna-Barbera building near Universal Studios.

I must wait to see Mr. Crouch and so am forced to spend the time with a demon—a two-foot mock-up of the Beast from Megiddo that sits on a pedestal near the receptionist. He glowers down at her with the withering contempt of a gargoyle, but she’s busy with the phones.

When I’m ushered into Crouch’s office, he’s seated behind a large, empty conference table and has just gotten off the phone. There is nothing on the table but that phone, which is black and erts a strange kind of power in the room. He moves past it gingerly to shake my hand, then scurries back as if he might have missed a call.

Crouch looks younger and edgier than I expected (he’s 39), with spiked hair and Elvis Costello glasses. The hair, in particular, startles. It stands up with a conviction you can only respect—the kind of overgrown buzz cut that is favored by surf punks and conservative football coaches alike. It’s just a haircut, but it allows Crouch to be legitimate in more than one camp: the one he came from—he’s the son of TV evangelists—and the one he’s creating.

In this new world, Crouch wants to come off as a visionary. Almost immediately he hands me a file of crisply colored ros. They’re media clippings about the flash miracle of his last film (CHRISTIAN FILMGOERS CREATE HEAVENLY BOX OFFICE FOR “OMEGA CODE”; SLEEPER “OMEGA” CRACKS HOLLYWOOD CODE). Have I seen the grosses? I have, but he seems determined to take back the folder and fish them out. The figures are indeed impressive: According to Variety, The Omega Code was the number one “limited release” of 1999, meaning movies that showed in 600 theaters or fewer. It pulled in a sweet $12.6 million—more than Boys Don’t Cry, more than _Topsy-_Turvy or Buena Vista Social Club. Crouch lets me stare at the numbers, then launches into his story.

“I was a nobody in this realm,” he declares, grimly smiling. For a moment, I’m not certain what realm he’s talking about, but then he looks down at the phone again, and I’m certain it’s the motion-picture realm. Indeed, his rise in that world has given him a strange energy, like some kind of distracted messiah. He tries to speak expansively, messianically, but his eyes keep darting down to the phone. This has become his lifeline, it seems, the sign that he has arrived in this town. Whenever it rings, an angel gets its wings.

“I came up and basically did like everybody else,” he continues. “Just knocked on the doors and said, ‘Hi, Mr. Ecutive in Hollywood. I have a stack of scripts here, and you can pick whichever one you like the best; it doesn’t matter to me. Because I feel like I can deliver an audience that you don’t know how to reach. You can call them whatever you want to call them. You can call them the Bible Belters; you can call them churchgoers; you can call them the right-wing Republican conspiracy.’ ”

Crouch knew that Evangelicals have long avoided Hollywood like the plague, mistrusting its secular ambitions and condemning its products as prurient and anti-God.

“Let me go before them,” Crouch says he said, in grandiloquent tones that Mr. Ecutive probably found hard to swallow. “Let me be the Moses before Pharaoh.”

As Moses, Crouch wanted just one thing: story control. “As long as I can monkey with the script and fit the values and the traditional mind-set of this core audience, they’ll come to the theater,” he promised. And then he finished with a biblical relish: “Let my people go…to the movies.”

It was corny, and it didn’t work. Hollywood—ancient home of the Jews—failed to return his calls. But Crouch was right about the Evangelical market: It was ripe for the taking, and virtually no one in the film industry was paying attention. And so Crouch did what any self-respecting thirtysomething with pipe dreams would do: He asked his parents for money.

These aren’t just any parents. Crouch is the son of televangelists Paul and Jan Crouch—prayerful hosts and owners of the Trinity Broadcasting Network, the biggest angels out there in the twenty-four-hour harvest of souls. Perhaps you’ve seen Paul on television, flashing his pastoral smile, making small but insistent demands on your pocket. Perhaps you’ve seen Jan crying at the sight of another $40 pledge, the tissues failing to absorb her emotions. They call the Crouch brand of faith “prosperity gospel”: Give unto TBN and the Lord will make you rich. The deal certainly has worked out for TBN: In just twent-yeight years, the Crouches have turned a single L.A. television station into a 600-station global empire. And they did it with nothing but love and $160 million in annual contributions.

For Matt Crouch, Mom and Dad were the perfect producers: deep pockets, flesh and blood. But Pop wasn’t convinced. “My dad, when I started talking about putting stories into the theatrical marketplace—assuming I could get an audience and I really was a Moses standing before Pharaoh—he just stopped me and said, ‘You know what? I understand what you’re talking about. I’m not stupid. But if you were really supposed to do that, wouldn’t there be an example in the Bible? One that would kind of confirm that that’s a good idea?’ ”

Crouch was stunned and at a loss for verse. How could he prove that filmmaking was part of God’s design? He knew the usual biblical mandate trotted out by Evangelicals whenever they wanted to resist a certain technology: “Be ye separate from the world.” Preachers had used it against radio and TV, warning that if the faithful tuned in, they were being profane. But those walls of Jericho had come tumbling down as soon as Christians found entertainment they liked: the CBNs and the TBNs, the _Hours of __Power _and the Praise the Lords.

Crouch thought long and hard about biblical precedents and finally came up with a scriptural doozy—one that impressed his dad and led the old man to fork over $7.5 million of TBN’s money for The Omega Code. This was the son’s pitch, and it remains his pitch: “Well, what does the Bible say Jesus did? He went around and told stories. Whenever He wanted to tell people something about being a good person, being kind to others, He would tell them a story about a farmer or this or that. He would use these stories to nudge people toward good. And that’s what I’m doing. I’m trying to utilize the quality of Hollywood and the storytelling parable of Hollywood and nudge people toward good. As far as I can tell, that’s what Jesus went around doing.”

You may have noticed that Crouch thinks and speaks in grand biblical metaphors. This is not so much because he’s constantly on autopitch, which he is, or because the Bible provides a ready pool of metaphors, which it does, but because he genuinely believes he’s living out God’s will. “I got chosen, I guess, before time began,” he declares, with an earnest look that indicates he is fairly psyched about the arrangement. Now that time has nearly expired, he vows to use the silver screen “for good rather than evil.” Even going over the box-office grosses with me, he notes that Omega Code cracked the top ten in a biblical way: “The number nine movie, Blue Streak—we did $2.4 million opening weekend; they did $3.6 million or something like that. They were on like 2,300 screens. We were on 305. See? So it was David and Goliath.”

Crouch had some experience working with the Goliaths of Hollywood. Before _Omega Code, _he was hired by Dream-Works as a marketing consultant for _The Prince of Egypt, _helping Jeffrey Katzenberg reach out to the Christian audience. That meant telling Jeffrey the hard news about the theme song’s not-ready-for-Christian content. Crouch screened the promotional video for the song “When You Believe” and noticed that Mariah Carey was wearing a revealing, low-cut top. “It was just cleavage city,” says Crouch. “So one of the things I did was to put film footage over the cleavage so it would not be objectionable to the Christian audience.” This, apparently, is the sort of work you must do when you are chosen before time begins.

Apart from toning down Mariah, Crouch’s Hollywood experience was limited before Omega Code, and he couldn’t have made the film without TBN. He got more than money from the network. He got a moral-support system, an advertising outlet and the promise of fervent ticket sales. After all, this was the audience’s movie; it had already paid for it. Crouch made constant appearances on his parents’ network during production of Omega Code, showing dailies and pumping up the crowd. In a way, he was following his father, who always tells his generous viewers, “Welcome to YOUR Trinity Broadcasting Network!” The message rang clear: Welcome to YOUR Omega Code.

Crouch’s biggest break may have come with the casting of Michael York as the Antichrist. Other Christian filmmakers have struggled mightily to get big-name actors to take their scripts seriously. Most, like the Canadian brothers Peter and Paul Lalonde, don’t have the money to get those big names and have had to scrape the Hollywood barrel, winding up with the likes of Mr. T. and Kirk Cameron. For Crouch, nabbing a famed Shakespearean actor like York gave the Omega project both a handsome Satan and a much needed dose of credibility, but it left Yorkies scratching their heads. Michael York?! Techno-sage of Austin Powers?! D’Artagnan?! Does he need work that badly? “Actually,” says York, “what Matt said to me was that more people go to church in this country than go to the movies. Which I thought was an astonishing figure.”

York didn’t say yes right away. He likes to mull over things. His face—still boyish but with a shadow of purpose around it—seems primed for mulling. York says he was raised Anglican but hadn’t seen the inside of a church in years. Yet he shared Matt Crouch’s take on how degenerate many Hollywood films have become (“a lot of sex and violence dressed up as entertainment”) and warmed to his pitch about making movies for the faithful. “Matt said he wanted to provide a film for this whole missing niche,” he says. “Play Hollywood at its own game—have special effects, even a car chase, a sort of thriller.”

York mulls for a moment. “Also, the timing was very significant. It was the millennium.”

The movie is set during the Tribulation, the seven-year period believed to be foretold in the Bible, in which the Antichrist rises to power. The whole look of the production signals a future that is recognizably not so distant. York plays a dark, mysterious media tycoon named Stone Alexander—“a sort of Rupert Murdoch” is the way he thought of it—who is none other than the Devil in human disguise. Stone is plenty powerful already, but he grows wickeder when he manages to steal a computer disk that contains a highly sought-after biblical code. This disk is just the sort of thing an Antichrist needs: It unlocks the hidden messages and secret prophecies of the Bible, allowing Satan to manipulate world events. God, forced into a corner, begins to rain plagues upon the land: famine, punishing sores, unspeakably large hailstorms. But the Antichrist impresses everyone by seeming to solve each problem. He feeds the hungry, gives money to the needy and promotes the idea of one world government (a sure sign of Satan or any liberal). The clueless people of the earth, tired of being hit by giant hailstones, roll over and acquiesce, creating one world under Rupert.

Megiddo picks up where Omega Code left off, slouching toward Armageddon, and leads all the way to the gates of hell. It’s a splashier, bigger-budget affair—$17.5 million—Crouch having rolled the money he made from the first film into this one. It’s a notch or two up from The Omega Code, which was God-awful. However, judging from the dailies I saw of the Final Battle sequences—all those gas bombs and decommissioned tanks—we’ll get through Armageddon just fine. You see, for budgetary and biblical reasons, York has to wage global war from a small tent in the desert. (The “secret location” is somewhere north of L.A.) He’s a raging brute, a Rommel of the Apocalypse, but the scenes of trench warfare make the Final Battle look oddly sleepy, more like the Final Episode of MAS*H.

York does bring a Learian relish to the role—you almost wish he’d chewed a few more curtains—and provides the best scene in the film. It’s a few days before Armageddon, and the Antichrist can’t wait for the big fight. He stands on a parapet of his castle, drinking wine with his evil assistant, the Guardian. The Antichrist makes sarcastic Revelation jokes and looks up at the sky. Go ahead, he tells God, spreading his arms wide. “Go and pour out the Bowls of the Wrath of God on the earth!” The heavens roil with contempt, but the Devil just cackles, then screams: “BRING IT ON!!!!!!!!!!”

···

“People are just going to vanish everywhere off the face of the earth. That’s what the Bible says will take place.”

I’m in frosty Canada, just over the Niagara, talking about the Rapture with the fabulous Lalonde brothers, makers of the film Left Behind.

Peter speaks. Paul listens. That’s usually how it goes. They sit in twin armchairs next to each other, Peter nursing a cold with tea and lemon, arching over the chair to make a point. Paul nods, bearded and silent, in a blue Superman sweater knit by his wife.

This is their penthouse and their playhouse, the top floor of a building in tiny downtown Saint Catherines. They own Cloud Ten Pictures—Canada’s answer to the Apocalypse—with production offices below. Up here, they have the run of the place. There’s a pool table in the center, a Raiders of the Lost Ark poster on the wall and a special chill-out corner where the two can muse, looking out over the snowy fields of Ontario.

They’re like kid brothers, and they’re excited about the Rapture. The Left Behind books take place in the same seven-year window as The Omega Code, but they concentrate on the Rapture—the fairly recent belief, held by Evangelicals, that one day there will be a mass disappearance of Christians and that this will signal the beginning of the End. It’ll be like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, this Rapture, but without the pod cleanup. Good Christians will be watching television or standing in line at Starbucks or, hell, making love to their wives as long as they’re not fantasizing, and—bam!—they’re gone. The title Left Behind refers to those who didn’t make it, who were not lifted up to heaven and so must endure the Tribulation, the Antichrist, the giant hailstones.

The Lalonde brothers have enjoyed imagining the fictive possibilities of the Rapture.

“What’s the first thing that’s gonna come to your mind when all these people are gone?” asks Peter. “It’s probably Star Trek, the transporter beam—Beam me up, Scotty. That there’s some alien ship up there that has beamed these guys up, some new technology, some new something.”

Suddenly, Paul speaks from the chair: “It’s hard not to think that virtually 100 percent of the people left behind are gonna think: aliens. There aren’t really a whole lot of alternatives when you get right down to it.”

The Lalondes talk about the Rapture so much that they will surely disappear right in the middle of a conversation about disappearing. They are good souls—and luckier than most of the pre-Raptured. They acquired the rights to the first Left Behind book for a song (they won’t say how much) before the series became a smash. And smash it is—an unbelievable one. Pick a record and the books have broken it: The fastest-selling fiction series of all time. The first Christian fiction book to debut at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Twenty-five million copies sold, eight installments and counting.

The books, with titles such as Tribulation Force, Assassins and The Indwelling: The Beast Takes Possession, are fast-paced thrillers in the Tom Clancy mode, but instead of submarines, you have the Antichrist. They follow the covert activities of a group of believers who find faith after they are left behind and become, well, anti-Antichrist. The characters have delicious names: airline pilot Rayford Steele, crusading journalist Buck Williams. The Prince of Darkness, naturally, is the secretary-general of the United Nations, a uniter not a divider named Nicolae Carpathia.

The Lalonde brothers eat this stuff up, and they couldn’t wait to make the movie. They’re Bible buffs—Bible prophecy is what hooked them on the Book in the first place—but also confessed Trekkies. Peter will tell you in one breath that “the Bible definitely predicts what’s going to take place in the future” and then launch into a sci-fi rave: “We’re all affected by the movies today. We want something_ big_ to happen.We want something cool to happen. You watch a Star Trek movie and you wonder, Man, what if we met a Klingon? And I think movies have fueled a sense of expectation—that something like the Rapture could play out in the world today. Because people want so badly for it to happen.”

Evangelical Christians have been wanting something badly to happen for some time: Their belief in the Rapture parallels their growing interest in biblical prophecy, the Pentecostal practice of looking hard at Scripture for signs of the future. It’s a subject that has compelled Evangelicals for centuries, quickened with the millennium and failed to diminish since. These days, Bible prophets are everywhere. Left Behind coauthor Tim LaHaye is one. (He wrote the catchy Are We Living in the End Times?). So is Hal Lindsey, the biblical consultant on The Omega Code. (Lindsey’s 1970 book, The Late Great Planet Earth, predicted chaos in the general vicinity of soon and sold 25 million copies.) Bible prophets thrive on recent historical events they see as triggers of the endgame: the creation of the state of Israel, any movement toward a one-world government and, most curiously, the adoption of the euro (an event that has failed to lead to a single cash transaction).

The Lalonde brothers got so into Bible prophecy that for years they had a TV show on Canadian cable called This Week in Bible Prophecy (“your front row to the future”). Peter and Paul would sit solemnly at a cheap news desk—back then Peter had a mullet—and report on current events they found ominous: wars, famines, anything to do with the Middle East. Each was evaluated as yet another sign of the End. (“As you know, the Antichrist is coming.…”)

All this prophecy, of course, has the distinct smell of revisionism to it. The idea of the Rapture, for instance, dates only from the nineteenth century, when an Anglican priest named John Nelson Darby started spreading the theory in the United States and Canada. For something that has blossomed so brightly, scriptural evidence is amazingly slim, based on a single passage in Thessalonians. At the Second Coming, the passage states, “we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.” You may think the words to meet the Lord in the air could be interpreted any number of subtle, beautiful ways. But since Evangelicals believe in the literal truth of the Bible, meetings with the Lord are held in the air. Of course, for those who traffic in the Apocalypse, coming up with a personal exit strategy is a brilliant idea. What better way to avoid the wrath and judgment you anticipate than to disappear like a phantom?

Through the years, the Rapture has become a crossover idea. Anyone who saw Michael Tolkin’s 1991 movie, The Rapture, appreciates the exotic, dramatic and even secular appeal of human ascension. It’s an idea rich in narrative possibilities and high on moral cant. There are winners and losers—the vanished and the doomed survivors—with a novel sense of mystery. (In Left Behind, dozens of people disappear during a commercial flight, missing beverage service and baffling the friendly skies.) The Rapture, in other words, is a brilliantly accessible concept, made for both the canned magic of movies and the transporting promises of salvation.

As for the Antichrist, he’s not even mentioned in Revelation, but Bible prophets like to throw him in, and it’s true: He does make an excellent villain. It doesn’t matter that the word Antichrist appears only in one section of the Bible—in John’s epistles, and even then seems to refer merely to anything or anybody opposed to Christ (“Who is the liar? It is the man who denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a man is the Antichrist”). But the demonic version of the Antichrist has become such an adaptable creature—his slippery powers of deception being his greatest strength—that in modern times, just about every political leader has to endure some website questioning whether he is the Antichrist. (In case you’re wondering, the one on Trent Lott is most convincing.)

So it’s all there in black and white, in script and Scripture—a fount of grim characters and scenarios for filmmakers working at the Apocalypse. When the Lalonde brothers wrote the script for Left Behind, they didn’t just turn to the book; they turned to the Book. Peter: “That opening sequence with the attack on Israel? How real does that play in our world today? And yet this was predicted 3,000 years ago! The entire script for the beginning of that movie, this all-out attack, is from the book of Ezekiel, written 3,000 years ago.”

The only problem with this process is that for Evangelicals, it requires fictive jumps of faith. You have to fictionalize what you believe to be literal. Matt Crouch, for instance, uses Revelation, chapter 16, for the Omega Code movies. He hops around from verse to verse, creating whole subplots and characters in between. Sometimes the Bible isn’t very helpful. Sometimes it simply and dramatically spells scenes out: “Then I saw three evil spirits that looked like frogs.” Other times it crams a whole lot of Apocalypse into one line: “The first angel went and poured out his bowl on the land, and ugly and painful sores broke out on the people who had the mark of the Beast and worshiped his image.”

Crouch and his writers have to use prophetic license. “You have to create a whole bunch of story to get from point A to point B, and that has to be fiction,” he says. “Some things are just not there, and no one knows certain things. So when you’re telling a story of the rise of a man to an Antichrist-type level of world dominance, you don’t know where he comes from—you get hints that maybe he comes out of Europe. There’s Babylon. Most Bible scholars say Babylon is the Roman Empire, a city set on seven hills—there are seven hills in Rome. So we stage our home base for the Antichrist in Rome. Our core audience doesn’t mind that as long as we don’t contradict one of the actual facts in the Bible.”

Left Behind coauthor Jerry Jenkins has the same problem. He is the one who actually writes the books, using his partner’s Bible prophecies. “What I try to do is take literary license only in the fiction part, with the characters and their occupations and the things they do,” he says. “But when it says, ‘At this point following the Rapture, there’s a plague from heaven or a hail or fire,’ I try to tell it exactly the way it appears in Scripture.”

Which makes it hard on the Lalondes, who in the end are two Canadian brothers spending their own money on prophecy movies. How can they compete with the Bible? How can they possibly film a verse like Revelation 16:21: “From the sky huge hailstones of about a hundred pounds each fell upon men”?

They can’t. They can’t even get Michael York. The biggest problem with their movies hasn’t been the technicalities of pulling off the Rapture. It’s money and pull, which in the movie business speak more clearly than Scripture. It’s the actors they can’t afford, the office in Hollywood they don’t have.

Their films—Revelation, Tribulation, Apocalypse—have been peopled by actors you thought were raptured years ago. Mr. T., Corbin Bernsen, Howie Mandel, Margot Kidder. (The thought of Margot Kidder enduring the Apocalypse is more than some of us can bear.) The star of Left Behind besides Kirk Cameron? Kirk’s wife, Chelsea Noble.

I ask Jerry Jenkins what he thought of the Lalonde brothers’ low-budget version of his book.

He chuckles.

“How ’bout them Cubs?”

And yet they’re as sincere as the day is long, the Lalondes. It makes you want to root for them. Perhaps they’ll be better filmmakers after the Rapture.

Until then, they sit up in their penthouse, two brothers, talking about the movies they’re going to make, the scenes of Tribulation they will wreak.

“Jack Nicholson! My ultimate!” says Peter to Paul. “How good an Antichrist would that guy be?”

···

As for Matt Crouch, he doesn’t seem to want the world to end.

It’s hard to shake the impression that he’s been consumed a bit by the Beast of Hollywood. That he has not “been ye very separate from the world” lately.

Crouch now speaks reverently of the day his life changed. He’s referring not to the day he accepted Jesus Christ but to the day he got the box-office returns for The Omega Code. “I was only getting sketchy details over the weekend of October 15 of ’99 when literally my life changed. When those numbers were coming in and we had done roughly $8,000 per screen opening weekend,” he says, the phone started ringing off the hook. Variety, AP, the L.A. Times. “Within about a five-hour period, some of the largest news organizations in the world had called my office.”

Now he sits in wonder at the glory of His work. “Every day that I live, I stand in amazement at the phone calls that come in here, the people I have the opportunity to potentially do business with. Every day I wake up, I live in awe of what has happened after eight years of being tested.”

Tested and chosen and—this is the part that steels him—made righteous by the process. If Crouch is a Moses, he sounds more like late Moses these days, the one who spent too much time in the desert, the one who thought he alone could make water flow from rock. Though he is humbled by the phone, Crouch is floored by his own Omega feats. “Has that ever happened? Has anyone else’s first project been the number one limited release of all films? The number one independently produced and distributed film of all films, of all independents? I mean, I’m not sure it’s ever happened. So I guess my test was over, and I realized I was right.”

But his test isn’t over. It is just beginning. Soon he’ll be lifted up to the Hanna-Barbera building. Soon he’ll find out if Megiddo has wings, if it leads him to greater heights. He has a few movies in the pipeline—a boxing flick about a fighter who keeps the faith, a cartoon feature of the Prodigal Son. There’s the one about a Christian DJ who crosses over into the mainstream and may be losing his soul.

But what about the end of the world as predicted in his movies? Doesn’t Crouch think we are living in the End Times? Aren’t we close?

A pause. “I actually sidestep that issue,” he says. “I have plans and visions swirling in my mind. They’re gonna take the rest of my life and probably the rest of my kids’ lives to do.” If you sit around thinking it’s the End, he says, “you have a tendency of not reaching your full potential.”

No, he says, waving off the Antichrist. “I don’t see this imminent kind of end-of-the world apocalyptic thing happening.” He shakes his head. “I just don’t see it that way.”

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